Sound composition for the exhibition titled "Pure Data (hamar)" in the Basement of the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd (Parroquia del Buen Pastor). Plaza del Buen
Pastor. 20006 Donostia-San Sebastián.
Pure Data (hamar) is a project based on the resistance encountered by Enlightenment thought
in the context of Gipuzkoa, summed up in the case of the introduction of the decimal metric
system as an abstract and universal value. This initial exhibition serves to contrast different
ways of ordering reality: mathematical, rhythmic, melodious, historical or divine.
As a convention, every measurement can also be understood as an expression of social relations
and therefore as a source of knowledge of the struggles that are resolved between different
interests of government and living together.
The aim of the project Pura data (hamar) is to work through the formal appearance acquired by
these phenomena and their assimilation as economic signs on the basis of their uses.
As an instrument of intervention in the world, it is possible to trace the adoption of the administrative-economic
paradigm facing the notion of the political back to the very origins of Christian
thought – as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben tells us. A system of management that
excludes any speculative operations, and whose reminiscences reach the Celestial Hierarchy of
the father of European mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who was at the same time
the founder of the economy and aesthetics.
If the changes brought by the modern age are understood as a continuity – an efficient purging
– of the administrative model described, then we would be talking about a new and old world
governed (spiritually) by numbers, statistics and percentages.